“Bollywood, South Se Kuch Seekho” Is An Invalid Statement! For Every Kantara There’s an Aaraattu, For Every Cirkus There’s A Brahmastra
When someone says "Aaj kal Bollywood bahut bakwas movies bana raha!" kindly ask them to watch any of this year's Pongal offerings from South Indian industry.
“Bollywood, South Se Kuch Seekho” Is An Invalid Statement, Here’s Why! ( Photo Credit – Movie Still )
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“South se seekho!” surely has been the universal advice given to the Bollywood film industry by numerous fans, critics, and celebs alike. Last week’s Pongal releases have surely been one of the major reasons to provoke such a thought but Bollywood should learn (everything) about South Indian Cinema. For every Kantara there’s an Aaraattu, for every Cirkus there’s a Brahmastra.
As per an insightful analysis done by folks down at Sacnilk.com, a total of 302 films releases in 2022 making a total collection of 8663.5 crores. Out of those, 108 Telugu movies got released and banked around 1874.8 crores, 81 Tamil collected around 1550.2 crores, 78 were Hindi movies earning around 3278.3 crores, 62 Malayalam movies earned around 438.9 crores and 36 Kannada movies netted around 647.6 crores.
If we step further into the above analysis, we’ll see Hindi films has the best average collection per film. Earning 42 crores per film, the Hindi film industry i.e. Bollywood beats the 2nd best Tamil Cinema (Kollywood) which earns around 19.13 crore per film. In 3rd position, we have Telugu Cinema (Tollywood), which also has the most number of films released with an average collection per film of 18.30 crore.
An interesting observation from this is, the second, third, and fourth position holders are extremely close to each other in the narrow gap of 1.15 crore. 4th position is held by the Kannada film industry (Sandalwood) with 17.98 crores. At the final rank, we’ve Mollywood i.e. Malayalam film industry clocking 7.07 per film in the year 2022.
The above study clearly states despite all the bashing and negativity, Bollywood managed to earn better per film than the other film industries. No, that doesn’t really say anything about the content but keyboard warriors bashing the Hindi film industry are the first ones to bring up how much a particular film from the South Indian film industry has earned.
From the box office, let’s now move toward the content. In a video recently shared by Jammy Pants of Tried & Refused Productions, he talked about the worst films of 2022 mentioning 10 movies from the Indian cinema as a whole. Just pause reading for a while and guess how many out of those ten will be Hindi films? Guessed?
Okay, so, if you’ve guessed that it’ll be more than half then you’re wrong and if you’ve guessed it’ll be less than half, even then you won’t have a correct guess. Because it’s exactly 50-50. Yes, from the 10 worst movies of 2022, 5 are from Bollywood & 5 are South Indian films. What does this explain? There will be movies with poor stories everywhere but that doesn’t make industries on the whole superior or inferior. So, next time, when someone says “Aaj kal Bollywood bahut bakwas movies bana raha!” kindly ask them to watch any of this year’s Pongal offerings.
